Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  The end of the Camusfeàrna otter idyll, the confinement of those two beautiful and much loved creatures who had once roamed joyful and free in and around Gavin’s enchanted sanctuary, was a bitter blow to his private hopes and dreams. He was full of nostalgia and sadness, guilt and grief. When he was later asked by a stranger whether his otters were free or were kept like zoo animals, he couldn’t bear to tell the truth. He blamed himself and his own species for the fate that had befallen Edal and Teko, and wrote some years later: ‘Both had been conditioned to an unnatural dependence upon humans and their company, and both had been deprived of it because when they became adult they had behaved like wild animals instead of like well brought up Pekingese dogs. If their behaviour had been bewildering to us, ours must have been even more so to them; they had both received life sentences for actions, which by the very hysteria that characterised them, were probably unremembered.’

  The full implications of the tragedy were summed up by Terry Nutkins, the young man who had watched it happen:

  All this shattered Gavin’s world. He had created this false world, with the otters that were his personal security (because human beings certainly weren’t), and now it was over. Maybe the death of Mij had marked the beginning of the end. Mij was the first. His happiest days were when he was at Sandaig with Mij – but Mij would have turned savage too one day. I couldn’t see a future for Gavin anywhere. Human beings were too threatening for him – they answered back, they were unreliable. But as soon as the otters attacked people they became unreliable too, and he became insecure, the whole of Sandaig became insecure, and disaster followed disaster to total destruction.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The habitat of marriage

  I sent a letter to my love

  On a sheet of stone.

  She looked down and as she read

  She shook her yellow hair and said

  Now he sleeps alone instead

  Of many a lie in many a bed.

  I sent a letter to my love

  On a sheet of stone.

  GEORGE BARKER, The True Confession of George Barker

  When I met Gavin again in London in the autumn of 1961 he surprised me by announcing that he was thinking of getting married. His reasons for doing so seemed, by his standards, conventional. ‘I want to come in from the cold,’ he told me. ‘I feel I have reached the age when I should settle down – not settle down, that’s the wrong word, it sounds like the Polar Star hitting a reef – I mean, introduce some stability into my life.’

  I was well aware that Gavin was attractive to women – not just physically, but in his wit and conversation, the romantic aura of his personality, and the warmth and enthusiasm of his companionship – and enjoyed their company. I was also aware that several of his women friends were extremely fond of him, and would be happy to be married to him if they could. But until this moment I had always believed that Gavin was disinclined towards marriage – an institution for which he had hitherto shown scant respect – by his sexuality, temperament and way of life. In this I had underestimated the extent to which he craved to be accepted as a normal member of society and to escape the solitude and insecurity of his bachelor life. Two factors, perhaps, had prompted him to consider matrimony now. For the first time in his life he had the financial means to maintain himself and a wife (whoever she might be) at the level he considered necessary. Secondly, he wished never again to endure the loneliness, the prolonged dark night of the soul, of his traumatic winter in Morocco.

  The idea of marriage was not, in fact, entirely new. As long ago as the summer of 1958, when Lavinia Renton, then thirty-four years of age, was holidaying with her two sons in the Dower House at Monreith, Gavin had told her: ‘If ever I get round to marrying, you will be the woman I shall ask.’ Gavin had known and liked Lavinia since his artist days in London in the late 1940s. An attractive and spirited woman, and a talented pianist and singer of opera and lieder, she was married to Gavin’s friend and fellow SOE instructor from wartime days, the conductor Edward Renton. But latterly the marriage had begun to come under strain, and looked likely to break down altogether. Lavinia recalled:

  The idea of marriage was born in Gavin and myself quite separately. On my side, I remember I took my two boys to visit him at his London studio to see Mij and afterwards we all went together to a film; and slap into the middle of my absorption in the film there suddenly flashed into my mind – not as a whimsy idea, but in a strangely definite and calm way – ‘One day I shall marry Gavin.’ It caused me neither surprise nor emotion – it was simply there, a fact, which seemed both logical and inevitable. I wasn’t even separated from Edward, but things were very rocky and broke that autumn. Of this, Gavin knew nothing. What eventually did happen was not a snap whim on our parts, therefore, but something which seemed, in time, bound to happen.

  What was it that Gavin admired in Lavinia? She herself could only speculate: ‘Gavin knew me for a great many years in various situations; he had opportunities to see me in my home, with my children, with Edward; we had talked often and intimately, and I know from mutual friends that he showed as unwavering a respect and affection towards me as I did towards him. He thought I was a good mother, a good “trouper”, a good cook, etc. He built me up into the perfect woman, strong, unemotional (yet he had seen me in rages, and knocked sideways on occasions), entirely capable in a somewhat masculine way, and able to enjoy and cope with the rougher sides of life.’

  By the summer of 1961 Gavin’s idea had hardened into a resolve. But there was a complication, for recently he had become a close friend of Caroline Jarvis from London Zoo. Gavin was very much drawn to Caroline and she to him. ‘We seemed to be a couple of waifs,’ he told Lavinia, ‘and she has gone through more hard times than you can possibly know.’ According to Gavin, Caroline poured out her heart to him, and Gavin for his part sought her company as a confidante with whom he could discuss his innermost hopes and plans. Caroline’s passion for wildlife and natural history were close to Gavin’s heart; but he had known and respected Lavinia over many years, and her social background was closer to his own – and to the standing and pedigree which he expected of a future wife. Lavinia was the elder daughter of the so-called ‘Secretary of Kings’, Sir Alan Lascelles, the former Private Secretary to both King George VI and the Queen, and first cousin of the Princess Royal (the late King’s sister). Before long Gavin was putting it about (erroneously) that Lavinia was fifteenth in line to the Throne.

  It was at Sandaig towards the end of August 1961, shortly after Edal’s attack on Terry Nutkins, that Gavin first seriously broached the subject of marriage to Lavinia, who was now separated from Edward. ‘I needed the companionship of a husband,’ she recollected, ‘and I understood him to have reached a point when he wanted a wife for the same reason.’ Two months later they met again at Paultons Square and talked about the possibility at greater length. Lavinia recalled:

  Gavin thought he could be different from what he believed himself honestly to be. He had the tremendous idea of being a full-blooded heterosexual male and believed that if only he had more of the heterosexual in him we would have an ideal marriage. The touching thing was that he would genuinely have liked to have been different (though he once said he would be awfully dull if he were!). Gavin’s decision to marry, I thought, was founded on a clear worked-out knowledge within himself.

  He gave me such an immense feeling of security by his warmth and gentleness and apparent confidence in me and belief in me – which all restored in me so much that had been wavering and unhappy, and I felt I could really find the necessary sort of peace and purpose with him. He always seemed to accept without criticism everything about me, and boosted my morale sky-high. I really felt that with Gavin’s faith in me my fears could be put behind me and my energies once more go outward to him and others instead of spinning round inside me in such a destructive, completely clogging way. And remembering the vital part my own father played in our childhood I regretted acutely the lack of a m
ale parent in Nicky’s and Simon’s growing-up years. So to remarry was a step which I felt would be not just for my own happiness or needs, but as much for theirs too. That Gavin would be able to meet the bill in this respect, I never had any doubts.

  It was agreed that Lavinia should come up to Sandaig again and see how she felt about the idea of living in such an isolated and unsophisticated place. A few days later Gavin wrote her a note: ‘I hope and pray that everything will work out. I know I want to try, if we are really active to all problems that may arise … I think when you come up we should make up our mind finally, and stick by whatever we decide, against all opinion or advice.’

  Lavinia spent ten days or so at Sandaig in mid-November. By the end of her stay she and Gavin had fixed a wedding date for 1 February 1962. ‘I was perfectly happy about the prospect of living at Sandaig,’ Lavinia recalled. ‘I was only too happy to turn my back on London and the music world following the break-up of my marriage.’ To Raef Payne at Eton Gavin scribbled off an excited note: ‘So Lavinia and I are going to be married. Announcement, I think, this week. Thank you for being as kind and understanding as always, and please I want you to be best man. I hope you will share a little of my fondness for her and that my marriage will be no barrier to a friendship that has lasted so long and is so infinitely valuable to me.’

  On 23 November a formal announcement of their engagement was printed in the Scotsman. Two days later a reporter from the Daily Mail turned up uninvited in Bruce Watt’s boat, bringing his bagpipes and seven pounds of kippers (an engagement present from Bruce Watt). The reporter’s arrival provided the occasion for an impromptu reiteach. ‘That, for my Sassenach readers, is the Gael’s jamboree,’ he wrote in his subsequent article, ‘which puts the seal on an engagement so firmly that even the wee folk can’t bewitch it away.’ The whisky flowed, the pipes played, everyone was happy. A day or two later the paper printed a photograph of the smiling couple walking arm in arm along the Sandaig shore beneath a caption which read: ‘The Road to Romance on the Isles’.

  All seemed to augur well, and Lavinia returned to London confident that she had made the right decision and happy that she was to marry the man she loved. But when her friends heard about the prospective liaison, some of them expressed reservations. One told her: ‘Lavinia, if you marry Gavin, he will go to bed with you a few times, but what he is really looking for is a mother-substitute.’ Kathleen Raine was greatly affected when Gavin wrote and told her the news. ‘I suffered to the extreme limit of my capacity,’ she wrote later. ‘Death would have been less painful, and infinitely less humiliating.’ She was brought up sharp by a friend who tersely reminded her: ‘No one, after all, ever imagined Gavin would marry you.’ She sent Gavin her blessings, believing that marriage might be the best thing for him, and hoped that he would have a family of his own and feel secure at last.

  Looking back, Kathleen reflected:

  I could have given Gavin what he needed. Not sexually – he never asked me to marry him. Sometimes I wish he had and I could have said: ‘Now look, Gavin, don’t be afraid, I don’t want to marry you. I have my destiny also, and it’s not like that.’ I truly think I could have remained the kind of friend who wouldn’t have betrayed him, who could have talked with him and even opened the gates of another kind of world and other kinds of experience for him. You may not believe it, but I do believe that. I do have gifts of a certain kind which were in some way appropriate to Gavin’s needs, as he was to mine. After all, I am a poet, I live in the imagination, I have read all the books – I could have been what Gavin needed if I had not messed it up. I don’t blame Gavin, I blame myself. I became too emotional, too obsessive.

  Now, in retrospect, I see I deceived myself. I didn’t see my true motives for what I was doing. What is called love is so often wanting to be loved rather than loving the other person. Only very wise or very good people can really love. I don’t regret all that. What’s the point of regretting? I am what I am. I regret that I was what I was. I totally regret it. Of course I do.

  Back at Sandaig all was not entirely well. It was late in the year now; the days were short and the house was beset by the rain and gloom of the gathering northern winter. Then the weather turned really bad. Hurricanes blew down the fences, salt from the roaring surf encrusted the windows of the house, the burn rose in spate and uprooted the trees.

  Gavin grew as gloomy and troubled as the season. The otter idyll was over, Edal was confined in almost zoo conditions, Gavin’s mother was seriously ill and he had quarrelled with Terry Nutkins. Gavin was smitten by a crisis of confidence, and to Lavinia on 18 December he penned an anguished cri de coeur: ‘No doubt things seem worse because I’m very tired, but I’m in a state of flat depression and at moments near to tears. Worrying is my hobby, but there does seem a lot to worry about at the moment. T. is being almost unbelievably wounding, which I fear shows the feeling of having been hurt and hitting back … Well, this is not the sort of letter to send one’s future wife for Christmas. So I won’t drool on – and only pray that a lot of things will come right that seem to have gone wrong.’

  With Christmas approaching, Gavin’s morale improved somewhat as he busied himself with Christmas presents, the impending wedding in the new year and routine Sandaig chores.

  I miss you and find myself also wanting to consult you on hundreds of things. Gawd – I hope I don’t have to work as hard as this after we’re married – today I’ve not only written thirty-five letters, exercised otters, cooked, telephoned, etc, but have corrected all the proofs of The Otters’ Tale. How’s that? Out! Or just about. Has a bridegroom ever been carried up the aisle on a stretcher, I wonder?

  I’ve sent by this post a list of relations to my mother – there seem to be exactly twenty Maxwell side and exactly twenty Percy side up to and including first cousins. I’ve asked her to explain to you who they are – if it isn’t too much for her!

  Now, will you please buy yourself something SO FINE for a Christmas present – it’s frustrating not to be able to do it myself but you know how it is. I should think up to £100 is quite safe. Anyway – GET CRACKING.

  Shortly before Christmas Lavinia came up with her two teenage sons, Simon and Nicholas, to spend part of their school holidays there – an experiment in communal family togetherness that was marred only by Teko’s unprovoked attack on the younger boy. But afterwards, though there was much to be done in preparation for the wedding, which was to take place in London, Gavin tarried at Sandaig, leaving Lavinia to attend to the many pressing details in London, including the purchase of her own wedding ring. In response to her reproach he scribbled a pleading postcard: ‘I long to be with you, but we have years ahead and I have so little left of my old life – and it has been so very precious to me – I NEED these weeks, in a way I can’t explain. Please, my darling, understand and help me. Our time is endless but my time is short … I’m being pulled into little pieces; give me time to put myself together again.’

  On New Year’s Eve the snow fell thickly and covered Sandaig in a pristine white mantle two feet thick right down to the sea’s edge. It turned intensely cold, so that the burn froze over, followed by the waterfall itself. ‘It froze solid,’ Gavin wrote, ‘still in the form of a waterfall, so that only the lack of movement betrayed its sculptural substance. Giant icicles formed a fringe from the banks of the pool beneath it, icicles more than seven feet long and as thick as a man’s arm, and the deep pool itself was solid for more than two feet.’

  Those last days of Gavin’s old life at Sandaig were fairy-tale days, the hills a crisp, blinding white, the sea blue, the night skies starlit and bare. The fire blazed in the hearth of the kitchen-parlour, still hung with Christmas decorations, and the plantation of young firs on the hillside above the house stood straight and orderly like a regiment of Christmas trees. A toboggan was improvised, to the enormous delight of Teko, not yet locked up and enjoying his last weeks of freedom. Teko would climb on to the toboggan, waiting impatiently for someon
e to push it down the slope, and as it slowed he would kick ecstatically with his hind legs to keep the contraption in motion.

  Gavin had staying with him at Sandaig his Sicilian friend and collaborator Giuseppe, who had played an important role in the research for both of Gavin’s Sicily books, especially The Ten Pains of Death, which he had in part written. The roads were still blocked with snow when the time came for Giuseppe to leave, and Gavin had no option but to launch the Polar Star and take him to the railhead at Kyle by sea. It was an enchanted voyage. ‘The winter sun was just up in a bare blue sky,’ Gavin recorded, ‘and the great white hills all about us were salmon-pink above a smooth enamel sea of beetle-wing blue. The Polar Star roared north between the frozen mountains … to us on board her the racing boat seemed the only moving thing in a world of ice-cold colour, her speed the direct expression of human exhilaration.’ Before Giuseppe came to Sandaig Gavin had warned him that the Scottish Highlands in winter would be wet, windy and dark. Now Giuseppe looked at him and grinned. ‘Credo che non conosci bene la Scozia,’ he quipped. ‘I think you don’t know Scotland very well.’